


The Change

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Fake Science, Gen, Involuntary Gender Switch, M/M, Other, WTF Genderswap
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 20:04:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1562363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So there I am, playing around because it's Saturday, and I end up with this meshuggah thing. I like it. I hope that, like "Mycroft's Vulnerable," I write more of it. That said, more than usual it requires some warning. </p><p>VERY AU. Gender swap, and it's involuntary--not to mention being 100% pure Fake Science. It takes place at a time very, very roughly equivalent to current time, post "Vows," but in a world so different that doesn't mean all you might think. Mycroft and Lestrade are an established married gay couple. John and Sherlock have never met, in part because John's life took a very different direction than he'd planned. </p><p>It's angsty without, IMO, wallowing. At least, not so far. Sherlock's a bit of a pill, but he'll get chances to improve later, and remember, he's not had all that Watsonian and Morstanian humanizing working on him. </p><p>Again, I'm hoping I add a few more chapters to this one. It's not quite freestanding or complete as it is, but this at least completed the first "beat" of the story. See what y'all think...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Mycroft would later think how very odd it was that, even before he was fully awake and aware, he knew—knew with heart-shaking terror—that something had changed. Oh, he could come up with logical explanations for the knowledge. Body-knowledge, after all, was a fundamental thing, and involved so many tiny sense-details. No doubt the world sounded wrong, the very weight of his own body felt wrong, Lestrade’s voice murmuring at the bedside resonated just that bit differently in slightly smaller ears, along remade ear canals. Breathing alone was different, his lungs smaller, and his—no, _her_ breasts a new and terrifying sensation weighing him down.

He—she—supposed she was lucky not to have been the first changed. She knew what had happened, even before he was—she was told. Still, it redefined her understanding of terrorism to experience it first hand.

The Changed: that was how they were spoken of. No one had any idea how it was done. That added to the terror—and added a tiny, irksome element of annoyance. There were just enough people who longed for what Mycroft had just had forced on him, who raged for their own reasons that the effect was a mystery outside the grasp of governments and nations to turn the event from a tragedy into a cultural alley-fight, bare-knuckle with anguish on both sides.

Mycroft, however, had never wanted to change bodies. He’d been quite satisfied to be male. He was not, he thought, misogynistic, but he was of a style and personality that made life inside a male community and a male subculture both natural and comfortable. He was a gay man who liked his gender, insofar as he “liked” anyone or any aspect of his own identity aside from his intelligence, which was, he admitted, paramount.

Thinking that in this new, body, changed overnight without warning or explanation, she shivered. It was going to be hell learning to be a woman—but at least he’d not have to get used to being _stupid._ Of the two, stupid would have been easy enough to achieve, and was something he lived in silent dread of: lead or mercury slipped silently into his food, a tumor growing silently in his brain, a stroke, a bullet… So many things could have taken away his core attribute, un-Mycrofting Mycroft. In comparison a bra and a twinset and a string of pearls couldn’t be that challenging, could they?

Her Majesty, after all, had managed being female for what was rapidly approaching a century.

She didn’t note that she hadn’t yet opened her eyes, or actually processed Lestrade’s quiet murmur, or even moved. Her bladder was full to the point of pain, but she hadn’t chosen to try to rise and do anything about it.

“Mike?” Someone—Lestrade—was holding her hand. “Mike, are you in there?” She risked a nod, and heard her partner—ex-partner? No, for the moment she’d believe he was still her partner, whom she could hear sigh with relief. “Good. Good. Sweetheart, look, something’s happened, and you need to know about it.”

That “sweetheart” alone would have told her, she thought. He never used that word for Mycroft—it was a word he used only with respect to women: with affection toward those he liked, with snarling sarcasm toward those who annoyed him, but always to women, never to men. Never to Mycroft. “Lover,” and “Love,” yes. “Dear”? Often. “Sweetie,” even. Not “sweetheart.”

“I can guess,” she whispered, listening to her new voice for the first time. It wasn’t as different as she’d expected…deeper than she’d feared. Then she remembered that her bones would be carrying the lower frequencies of her voice more effectively than air would, and that she would have to wait to hear her voice recorded to have a full sense of the change. Still, she’d been a comparatively light tenor. Maybe she’d been lucky, and was now a low alto?

All of which wasn’t to the point. “What did you say?” she asked Lestrade. “I’m afraid I was a bit—distracted.”

Lestrade gave a sudden chuff of amusement. “Still the same old Mycroft. Understatement as a way of life. All I was saying was that you’re still at home, and Lady Smallwood is sending over a change-team to confirm and make arrangements for you. I’m here. No one’s been told, yet, not even Sherlock or your folks. Lady S. is going to make sure you’ve got time and privacy to adjust before she lets the world flood you, all right? You’re safe. We’re here.”

She swallowed, still unable to bear the thought of opening her eyes. “And…you’re here?” She trusted him to hear the larger question in what was otherwise a rather stupid question.

He sighed and gripped her hand tighter. “Yeah, love, I’m here. Look at it this way—for once you lucked out, me being bi. Not as much of a deal-breaker as if you’d been married to pure Kinsey six.”

Mycroft nodded, then asked, forlornly, “Am I… how… I wasn’t a particularly pretty man.”

“You’re beautiful,” Lestrade said, a smile in his voice. “Were, are, and always will be, love. To me, you’re always going to be drop-dead gorgeous.”

It was silly, Mycroft thought—of a piece with his tailored suits and immaculate grooming. He had always been a vain man far too aware that he had too little to be vain about. But Lestrade’s warm assurance made a difference. With that promise in his ears, he could bear to open his eyes into the glare of sunshine, and face the changes forced on him.

oOo

She was not, however, beautiful. Not by any stretch of the imagination she could manage. Soon after Lestrade’s assurance, biology had imposed its necessities upon her. With help, she’d risen and tottered with unsteady balance to the bathroom. Her first destination had been the toilet, where she’d found that within certain limits she was able to master the mechanics. She didn’t pee where she didn’t intend to pee, and while she found herself running a wad of toilet paper under the tap to wipe herself something like as clean as she was accustomed to achieving with a simple shake, she did get through the whole process. She stood, washed her hands carefully—and then, almost as an afterthought, looked up into the mirror over the sink. Her heart fell.

Like all the Changed, she had the blessed advantage of good skin—new, pristine skin, fresh-made by the Change itself—a blessing that seldom lasted more than a year or so, as Changed bodies centered in on the biological norms of their birth-ages. Scientists were still debating that, trying to determine if the Changed body was a clone in some sense, suffering shortened telomerase chains just like the original, or if some other mechanism was in play. It didn’t matter right now. She had fresh skin over a bone-structure that already reflected her age. The nose, lighter than it had been when she’d been a man, was still beaky, droopy, and pointed. Her eyes were still small for her face, her chin short. On the up-side she had her hair back. On the down side it was perhaps more obvious than ever that it was the dark, rather boring auburn of a former-carrot-top in mid-life.

Her skin was the too-fair, slightly transparent pink of a red-head, with the ghost of teenager’s freckles and the first flecks of age-marks. She could see her veins in her hands and at her temples. Her mouth was too wide—never a particular concern as a man, but she could instantly see that in a woman’s face it was an “ugly” mouth. Staring at herself she had never been so bitterly aware of the difference in expectation between men and women. As a man he’d been quite good enough for every-day, if not sufficiently arm-candy for dress-up and fancy. As a woman she was, quite simply, plain verging on ugly…the sort of face that might, if managed carefully, be evaluated as “striking,” but not ever as pretty or beautiful, and now, even with gorgeous skin, what would definitely be considered “past her prime,” or “beyond her sell-by date.”

She stepped back, and considered the rest of what she could see. Her first thought was that she was short—then logic insisted that, while shorter than her former 6’1”, she was still tall for a woman, and built like a tall woman as well. Long legs, though she didn’t much like her calves. Long arms. And, yes—she still had the insanely long neck, though now slimmed and made unexpectedly graceful and swanlike, not simply like Sherlock’s, but finer still. No Adam’s apple anymore.

Her breasts were set low, and were unexpectedly full. Insofar as he had ever considered breasts, she supposed she now had “knockers,” or “melons.” A nice pair of cantaloupes. The nipples seemed obscenely large, high-peaked and pink, with wide aureola. Her waist was not particularly narrow, but her hips were wide. She immediately disliked the round curve of her belly. She forced herself to look at the mound of her genitals—or, from this angle, and from an admittedly biased perspective, her lack of genitals. God, she missed her cock.

A sentence she’d never expected to even think in the privacy of her own mind.

There was a soft tap outside the door. “Change team have arrived, Mike. I’ve told ‘em they can damned well wait till you’re ready, but… you all right in there?”

She drew in a deep breath and straightened, only to find it accentuated everything she didn’t want to see: the awkward, lanky figure—thick-waist, broad hips, deep breasts, unappealing height—everything.  “Just assessing the damage,” she said, voice shaky.

There was silence, for a moment, and then Lestrade said, “You know, you’re seeing it through the wrong eyes. Or maybe the right eyes—you were never attracted to women. You tended to see them the way they see themselves: demanding, unforgiving, and not particularly seduced by any natural appeal. Why don’t you let me in and try seeing through my eyes, yeah? Bi-eyes? May help a bit.”

She considered, and realized in terror that she wasn’t ready for that. It was hard enough seeing through her own cold, unimpressed eyes. Trying to integrate what she saw with who she’d been, who she was now, what her lover had once seen, what he saw now…what she yearned for him to see…

“I don’t think I can,” she said, voice shaking. “I’m sorry. Later. Can you pass me my robe?”

“Sure thing, love,” he said, and a moment later the door cracked open and the lush silk was passed in—heavy silk with cording and a tasseled tie and a rich paisley pattern in burgundies and greens and glowing blue and gold. He…she slipped it on and cinched the tie tight. She looked away from the mirror before straightening again, focusing on the feeling of adamant poise and posture, refusing to see the image in the mirror of an aging woman shoving her breasts out into the world. She opened the door and walked out, her balance already improved over when she’d entered. “The Change team—tell them they can come up, now.” She couldn’t meet Lestrade’s eyes—they, like the mirror, might tell her too much.

She just barely managed to bite back the protest when he came behind her, almost exactly her new height, now, and kissed her on the nape of the neck, hands cupping the points of her shoulders. Instead she closed her eyes and forced herself to imagine the sensations inside the illusion of her old body. She smiled, thinly, then went to sit on the edge of the bed, waiting for the Change team to arrive.

oOo

They were well-trained, and kind. Mycroft had heard various stories—some teams were said to be crass and cruel, amused at the predicament the Changed found themselves in. Many in the culture at large comforted themselves from the fear of Change by assuring themselves that, somehow, the Changed had deserved what was done to them—that they’d been sexually deviant already, that they’d flaunted some perceived failure to conform to gender expectations, that they’d lived recklessly, presented themselves as targets. Mycroft knew that any and all those things could easily be said of him, if the Change team had wanted to blame the victim. An active gay, married to another man, a bit of a dandy, and to top it all off one of the premier targets for terrorism in the entire secret service structure? He supposed looked at that way he’d been walking around for decades with a sign taped to his back saying, “Change me, I’m gagging for it.”

He didn’t know whether this was just a good team, or if Lady Smallwood had made sure to send him their best. In any case, they were gentle and nonjudgmental. They took the DNA samples that would establish he was himself, barring a single chromosome shift. The doctor on the team performed a thorough, embarrassing, but compassionate physical, and a basic OB/GYN check.

“You appear to be normal. Lucky—every so often the Change goes wrong, and leaves a chimera. True androgyn, usually underdeveloped in both genders. Unpleasant for everyone emotionally—a shock, and one that demands some choices be made, even if the choice is to make no choices. You appear to be healthy, fully functional. Um—if you ever wanted to have children, now’s not a bad time to do it. You’ve got a year or so additional fertility tacked on that an unChanged woman wouldn’t have. Like the complexion, only it lasts a bit longer. Or…” she glanced uneasily toward the bedroom door, toward the outer rooms where both knew Lestrade was pacing, waiting for word. “Maybe I’m presuming too much. But he seemed like he’d want to stick with you. It could be a chance for both of you. Something you can offer now to make up for what you can’t offer anymore, you see.”

She did see, and was both relieved and completely horrified by the power of that appeal. Her own children—hers and Lestrade’s. Another man might have found it no comfort at all, but Mycroft knew himself…herself…and knew that the lure of children was so strong it might well make up for everything.

“It’s…possible,” she said, cautiously. “Thank you for bringing it up. I might not have thought of it—either to encourage it or to prevent it, either way. It’s not been an issue so far,” she added, wryly. “Hardly a matter of concern before.” She tried to remember if she and Lestrade still had condoms in the house. They hadn’t needed them for ages…

“What can we do to help?” the doctor said. “Do you need a basic walk-through of the plumbing? The NHS provides counselors, though I suspect you’ve got people who’ll be managing that within the parameters of your governmental service. We can also offer Big Sisters—women willing to help you adjust to the differences the Change will impose. They’re volunteers, but many are bright, capable women with good heads on their shoulders. People have found the program and its brother program quite helpful.”

Mycroft shook his head. “No. I think I need to talk to my superiors, first, and get a sense of what they’re going to expect. One of the drawbacks of my position: quite a number of choices in my life are affected by national security concerns. If nothing else, as a victim of a terrorist attack there will be internal security issues before I make any move at all, even telling my family.”

“Understood, ma’am,” the doctor said, and stood, gathering her kit. “We’ll have word back to you soon on the basic tests, the DNA and the blood work. You should, however, report to a clinic for a full top-to-bottom checkup soon. Your people will know what’s required. The Change comes with its own risks, including an altered risk of cancer—both higher risk and lower, depending on a number of variables.” She straightened and offered her hand. “I’d like to say, ma’am, that it’s been an honor attending you. You’re coping with exceptional grace and dignity. Regardless of gender, you do honor to your service.”

Mycroft took the woman’s hand gingerly, and met her eyes. She drew in a shuddering breath, feeling tears threaten. “I’m—not so sure about that. I feel quite shattered, if you must know.” Her voice shook with the stress and grief.

The doctor nodded, a terse, formal gesture. “Of course you do. That’s not the point. You’re dealing—proactive, sensible. Tears? We all cry when it happens. It’s what’s under the tears that matters.”

Mycroft blinked. “You’re…”

“Three years ago come August, ma’am.”

Mycroft frowned, and said, “Oh. I…” She blinked. “Does one offer condolences, congratulations, or just—admiration? I’d never have guessed. You’re so....” She looked for a word, and said, flailing, “You’re so centered—so in balance. I never would have realized.”

The doctor shrugged. “It’s a hell of a steep learning curve, ma’am. I can’t say it didn’t come as a terrible shock. But once you settle in, it’s less change than you might expect. The hardest part is getting past thinking with a body you don’t have anymore. Biology is more destiny than you’d really like to believe, even if it’s less than it could have been. The body has its own ideas about some things.”

Mycroft grimaced. “I suppose I’ll be learning about that soon enough,” she said, her voice grim. “In the meantime—you’ve been a superb representative of your service. Might I know your name? I’d like to pass on my appreciation.”

The doctor nodded. “Captain Watson,” she said. “They transferred me out of Army to high security Change management after I went through it, but I’ve still got my rank. I’m considered on active duty, seconded out to your people.” She cocked her head, then said, with some uncertainty, “Ma’am? You’re going to need support no matter what. Women who’ve always been women—lifers. But it helps to have a Changie to help, too. If you’d like, well…I’d be honored to serve as your Changie Sister. I’m bollocks at fashion and no damned good at all with how to put on makeup or walk or public manners. But I’m top of the line at how to cope with waking up in the wrong body.” She fished in a pocket, pulled out a worn card case of cheap synthetic leather, and took out a professional card. “If you’re interested.”

Mycroft met grey-blue eyes and pondered the question. Finally she took the card gingerly and slipped it into the pocket of her robe. “I…I can’t promise. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next ten minutes, much less over the weeks and months to come. But I’m honored, and I think there’s a good chance you’ll get a call. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, ma’am,” the captain said, and left.

oOo

Anthea and Lady Smallwood arrived hard on the heels of the Change team—so soon after they’d departed that Mycroft had no doubt that they’d been monitoring the Pall Mall flat. Mycroft found it fascinating—apparently the Change hit both women on some subconscious level he…she never would have expected. She could see them struggling not to sweep up and hug him and fuss over him, hens rushing to brood over a wounded chick in their care.  He was glad Lestrade hovered close behind him, at his shoulder—he had the sudden suspicion that his partner’s male presence spared him a certain amount of emotional flutter he wasn’t ready to endure yet.

Anthea stopped a few feet short of him, and shifted uneasily from foot to foot. “Mr. Hol… Sir…I mean…”

“Mycroft,” said Lady Smallwood more firmly. She strode up to him and held out both hands, wrapping them about his when he automatically responded. Her hands were strong and soft, and they pressed tight without confining him. “So sorry this had to happen to you, but I’m convinced no one is more blessed with the discipline to see this through. How are you coping so far?”

“According to the doctor who just examined me, quite well,” he said. “In my own opinion, rather less well, I’m afraid. With all respect to your gender, it’s not one I ever aspired to share.”

Her mouth flickered in a smile, and her eyes laughed. “Some are born female, some achieve female standing, and some have feminine identity thrust upon them. Welcome to the third category. For what it’s worth—speaking for myself, I’m honored to have you join me in the League of Intelligent Women. New members are always welcome. Having seen you at work, I suspect you’ve just raised the IQ of the League a perceptible amount.”

He felt an unexpected smile tug at his own mouth. “Modesty forbids me to comment, ma’am…and vanity, likewise. No matter what I say, one will be offended.”

She laughed, then let his hand go. “You always were an exemplar of calm in crisis. Now, here’s what needs to be done first. Anthea and I must take basic measurements, so we can purchase you basic clothing. Then you must eat, and relax, and if necessary get stinking drunk. Sleep. Clothes will be delivered this afternoon. Tomorrow you’ve got to have a complete clinic check, have a new set of ID paperwork put together, and so on. Anthea can manage the shift in regards to most of your professional situation, though—no need to put you through all the fuss and bother. I do recommend you take at least a month off work, and I insist on your signing up with all the Change support services MI6 offers. No, don’t glower at me, my dear. It’s proven well worth the discomfort, and it will give you a chance to work out what positive changes you may want to make as a result of this. I know you too well to expect you to want to shift back to field work again, with the blessing of an entirely new body to help provide cover, though some of our agents have regarded that as the primary blessing to be had from the Change. But there are other aspects that may appeal to you. You always did like La Belle Middleton—you may find it easier to serve within the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s household as a woman than you would have as a man.”

And that was what happened—which was usually the case with Lady Smallwood’s pronouncements. She and Anthea dragged him away from Lestrade back into the bedroom, and proceeded to measure his new body from top to toe, having even brought one of those odd devices for determining shoe-size. They measured him upright and leaning over, they measured his inseam and his outer seam, they measured several different dimensions of his new breasts…

And then they were gone, and Lestrade was saying, “They’ve sent a big basket from Fortnum and Masons.” Mycroft went out and looked at the basket. Afterward he could never explain, even to himself, why it was the sight of a £500 Belgravia Hamper that reduced him to sobbing tears.

He was able to state, though, that once the storm had passed the hamper also provided a good deal of comfort, as did Lestrade. Mycroft still couldn’t bring himself to look into his partner’s eyes, but he was able to lean wearily against his lover, his back to Lestrade’s chest, breathing in the familiar scent of cotton shirt and deodorant and Lestrade. They nibbled Stilton cheese and water crackers, slivers of ham, drank sweet port, and slowly Mycroft relaxed.

Foods didn’t taste quite the same, but it all tasted good—perhaps even better than before, as again the body was new and fresh. Lestrade was warm and comforting, and he seemed little changed by Mycroft’s own Change. Mycroft suspected there was shock and dismay lurking between them somewhere, but right now he could almost believe that Greg saw no more difference in his spouse than he would have if Mycroft had changed from a pinstripe suit into country tweeds. They avoided the topic of the Change—not because Mycroft intended to do so forever, but it had owned her day from waking on, and it was time to pretend, for just a few hours, that it didn’t matter.

Mycroft let the meal loiter on for over two hours. At last she rose, and brushed off the crumbs. “Well. One more thing to do for now,” she said, and walked over to the computer. She pulled up her email account, and typed in Sherlock’s address quickly, before composing the body of the message.

“ _Crucial event underway. Must consult with you soonest. My flat, any time today. Mycroft.”_

Within ten minutes the response came back, “ _5:00. SH”_

oOo

“He’ll be fine,” Lestrade said, calmly, as Mycroft paced the living room. “You know Sherlock—he’s more likely to be fascinated than anything. If you’re not careful he’s going to want to chop off bits for experiments.”

“I know, I know,” Mycroft muttered. She was wearing the first of the clothes sent over by Anthea and Lady Smallwood—a neat, trim pair of women’s chinos, a crisp white blouse, a fancy brocade vest that hung open and draped over her hips, hiding the wide swell Mycroft would otherwise have detested. “It’s just---it’s the first time, I suppose. But you’re right. He’ll be threatening to perform his own obnoxious examination and I’ll have to point out how inappropriate that would be. He’ll sulk. But it’s going to be fine.”

They both were quiet. Mycroft took another lap around the perimeter of the Persian carpet, tracking the ornate border.

“He’s later than I expected,” she said.

“It’s only 4:56,” Lestrade said. “And if he’s anything, he’s usually late.”

“I know. I just…”

“I know, love, I know.”

There was a knock on the door. Mycroft stepped forward, and froze.

“I’ll get it,” Lestrade said, softly, and scooted quickly to the door. He swung it open.

Sherlock head down as he brushed his feet on the mat, growled, “This had better be important. I was working on a blog article on the deterioration rate of house paint in the London suburbs when you…”

Mycroft’s brother looked up, then, and came to a complete, stunned halt. He straightened, eyes wide. He looked up. He looked down.

Then he grimaced, nose crinkling in disgust, upper lip rising in a half-snarl.

“Oh, my God. What did you go and do that for?” He scoffed and shook his head. “God, Mycroft, that’s…that’s obscene. I don’t care what caused it—do something about it. You’re not fit to be seen out in public like that.”

And he turned and swept out of the room, snatching the door out of Lestrade’s grip and slamming out without another word.

Lestrade flushed red, and grabbed at the door, but Mycroft darted across the room and leaned hard, holding it shut.

“Don’t,” she said. “Either he’ll get over it, or he won’t. But he’s Sherlock. Right now nothing you can say will help at all.”

Lestrade met her eyes, and said, very softly, “Not even that I love you?”

She swallowed hard, and husked, “Well. Perhaps that.” Then she melted into Lestrade’s arms, and had her second good cry of the day.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mycroft's first steps back into The Real World as He Knows It. Life is not quite what he had understood it to be. Being female is a game played by different rules.
> 
> The illustrations of how society plays the game of "gender" have very little to do with my notion of the ideal, and quite a bit to do with my darker and more cynical understanding of the far too real. Please do not consider much of this to be any argument on my part for how life SHOULD be, and only a splintered, fragmentary illustration of some of how I feel it is.
> 
> For the record: I'm birth-female, quite content with that, but not always content with the rules of the social game that go with my gender of birth.

The morning at the clinic getting a complete work-up was, quite frankly, dull. In even slightly better emotional frame Mycroft could have wrung interest out of it like a fairytale Jack wrung wey from a “stone” cheese, asking probing, devilishly tricky questions that made him a least-favorite among all sorts of professionals across Europe and America—indeed, world-wide. As it was, he wanted not to know…and not-knowing was hard, and required a certain drab focus, keeping his mind on burying his head in the sand. It’s insanely difficult to refuse to notice one’s gender change when being examined intimately in a full OB/GYN checkup. Or while getting a mammogram. Or…

Suffice it to say, Mycroft found it all gray and stressful at one and the same time, and he spent more time evading devilish questions than asking them.

“Contraceptive, Mrs. Lestrade?”

“Holmes. Mycroft Holmes. Mr. Lestrade is my husband.”

The doctor stammered apology, then asked again, “Contraceptive? At your time of life you don’t want to become, er, _enceinte.”_

“I am not _ancient_ , and I haven’t yet decided about becoming _enceinte._ Or pregnant. In the family way. Bun in the oven. Up the duff. I haven’t decided. Nor has my partner. We’ve had slightly over twenty-four hours to even consider the possibility—certainly not enough time to either rule it in or out. Is this so difficult to understand?”

“But—you’re not.... You’re _Changed,”_ the doctor said, in scandalized horror. “It’s…not…normal.”

“Goodness, you don’t say?” Mycroft snapped, furious. “I hadn’t noticed. Me, I thought men and women just woke up and, hey presto, abracadabra, they’d flipped. No. It’s not natural. That said, the possibility of offspring of my own is the single redeeming possibility anyone has presented to me to offset the losses of this event, and I’ll thank you kindly not to snatch such a smug, disapproving defeat out of the jaws of one of the very few victories being offered me. Contraceptive, but simple, mechanical, and in my own control, thank you. Options?”

“Um…IUD isn’t under your direct control. That leaves cervical cap, diaphragms, male or female condoms—though you did say under your own control—sponges. I can show you…”

“Condoms,” Mycroft said, sharply, emotionally scrambling from the implications of the other choices. The need to become profoundly familiar with his...her new…plumbing…demanded by other techniques was horrifically intimidating. Then, with a blaze of fury that set her against her own ignorance, she said, “No, wait. Diaphragm. And send someone over to teach me how to use it.”

“We’re hardly at your beck and call, Mrs. Lestrade,” the doctor grumbled.

“That’s what you think.”

He frowned at her, patronizingly. “Now, now, be reasonable.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, voice silken, “I _define_ reasonable. It’s a very basic formulation. I administrate—you cooperate. I define. You conform. Got it?”

The look the doctor gave her was toxic in ways Mycroft didn’t think she’d often encountered before… at least, not often since public school days, when he’d taken the piss out of snotty boys of aristocratic family who’d been a bit too quick to assume levels of entitlement over the mere gentry genius that were not warranted….

The doctor stormed out, and Mycroft followed him with her eyes, frowning. Beside her a nurse said, softly, “He’s angry because you’re a woman. You’re not allowed to talk to him that way. It’s generally considered bitchy. You know. Ball-breaker.”

He stared at her. “I’m _not_ ‘a woman.’ I’m Changed. There’s a difference.”

“Not a good one,” she said, gently. “If anything, he wants to see some submission even more. It scares him. Creeps him out. Gives him nightmares. Part of him is afraid you can pass it on. He needs to see you being a…girl. He’s not going to be very nice about it.”

“And we don’t have better than him?”

She shrugged. “Luck of the draw. Ten minutes later you’d have got Larraby, who’d think being changed meant you were gagging for a good hard rogering. Or Singh, who’d think you were ‘predisposed.’ Or Midge Enders, who proves being a woman doesn’t mean you’re a better OB/GYN. Her theory is that you’ve all got a genetic instability that will corrupt the gene pool and that you should all be neutered for the good of the populace. Most of them won’t say it aloud: they know what it means to their employment.” She tidied up the examination room, then turned to him. “Two things—there’s a clinic night that’s just for Changed—staffed by volunteers, a lot of them either Changed themselves or close to someone who is. It’s particularly good for topics like this. And second…” her eyes were cold, as she examined him. “So you’re _Changed._ How does that make you any more or less entitled to put that stroppy little pillock in his place than any normal woman? We all have to put up with that crack, _sister._ You might want to remember it the next time some rabbitty little vermin tries to put you in _your_ place.”

She left with almost as much emotional turmoil as the doctor had. Mycroft, sitting in an ugly examination gown, clutched the fake leather of the examination bench and scowled.

A few moments later Anthea came in. “According to the nurse, you’re done now, sir. Ma’am.”

“Mmm,” he said. Then, “I think I’ve just been given a bit of a take-down. For the record, my dear, I detest learning experiences. They are always so lowering.” She pushed off, and asked, “Do you know where my clothes ended up?”

“Other room,” she said, and led her to the first examining room she’d been taken to. As she dressed, she said, “Where next?”

“Lady Smallwood’s club, then Saville Row. Lunch and then clothes.”

“How very gender-appropriate,” she drawled. “I am female, therefore I am among the ladies who lunch. And shop. I see you haven’t added practice at the shooting range or a few hours amongst the incoming analytical data to the afternoon’s schedule.”

“One thing at a time, Mr… Miss..”

Mycroft sighed. “Just ‘Holmes,’ will probably do. Not precisely as grovelingly subordinate as it might be. Or you could call me ‘M’ and amuse everyone.”

She sparkled, then, and said, “I like it. ‘M’ it is. M, you need to eat, and you need to have a new club, because the Diogenes won’t have you anymore, and you need a wardrobe if you’re going to function in your old position. They’re all crucial. So we do those things first. The fact that they’re fun is just a fringe benefit.”

The realization that, no, the Diogenes was unlikely to easily accept a Changed member stabbed him to the heart. Technically the club accepted all genders. In application, though, it was a _men’s_ club—and almost certainly would accept a woman by birth long, long before it would accept one of the Changed. He swallowed. “I am sure I know, but remind me—what’s Lady Smallwood’s club?”

“Shrewsbury Club,” she said, with a smile. “You’ll like it. It’s not as quiet as the Diogenes—for the kind of silence you like you’ll have to go into the wing they call the ‘sacred precinct,’ where speech isn’t allowed. The rest of the place they chatter like starlings. But it’s one of the least fluffy of women’s professional clubs, and it’s almost as useful for women like…well, like us…as the Diogenes has been for you until now.”

oOo

Though his throat ached and his fists knotted, he had to admit he did like the Shrewsbury. It was perhaps more colorful than the Diogenes, but while there were flowers, there was no chintz, and though he could have done without the spritely woman who minded the desk he was forced to concede that she had sufficient dignity to make up for a good deal.

“I’ll be putting you up for membership later this month,” Lady Smallwood said. “Shouldn’t be a problem. We’re already accepting Changed, though a few of the whinier feminists are convinced that while birth females and transsexuals are permitted, Changes are ‘merely women by happenstance, with no understanding or loyalty to the gender.’” She snorted. “Frankly I don’t give Sweet Fanny Adams for loyalty to the gender, so long as they understand what it means to stand by a political alliance. Which is more than I can say for a few of our whinier feminists.” She swept Anthea and Mycroft into the dining room. “Anthea, have you made it through your apprentice membership?”

Anthea nodded. “Journeywoman.”

“Good, then. I’ll probably suggest you as Mycroft’s native guide. Comfortable with that?”

She nodded again. “Already have that down cold, ma’am,” she said, with a grin.

Lunch was actually an improvement on the offerings of the Diogenes, presenting Mycroft with a more varied and lively menu, though somewhat smaller portions and with rather a lot of salad crammed into the edges of all the offerings. He made a mental note to ask if this was a normal element of gender-specific dining, even as he indulged in a grand salad of seafood, crisp romaine lettuce, eggs, tomatoes, asparagus, and a pink, sweet-tart salad cream.

“Where are you taking him next,” Anthea asked Lady Smallwood, as she made her own way through an order of grilled fish.

“I’ve made an appointment with Ginny Chang,” Lady Smallwood said.

Anthea made an impressed and approving sound, like a startled pigeon. Mycroft frowned.

“Who’s Ginny Chang?”

“Private. Bespoke. And among the few people I’d trust to help you make this transition. Consider her a cross between your beloved men’s bespoke, and a genius like Chanel. She’s—fluent. Exceedingly fashion fluent.”

oOo

He thought he might hate Ginny Chang. She was ugly, coarse-featured, with a bawling voice that edged near to baritone, her chin stubbled as though she was suffering some hormonal condition. Her clothes seemed to attempt to erase her gender—what in popular parlance could only be considered ‘butch.’ They seemed to fight her gender.

In contrast, to his dismay, the first illustration she offered Mycroft and his two “keepers” were, to his eye, blatantly feminine. The tailored jackets were designed to actually give an exaggerated sense of a waist, far in excess of what his own new figure offered, with dramatic darting, dark cording highlighting the wasp-waisted curve of the structural seams. The jacket had a long, deep, flared peplum turning it into a cross between a Victorian frock-coat and a very short woman’s dress from the fifties, flirting out wider than Sherlock’s Belstaff, almost begging for petticoats and lace. In contrast the trousers were trim, almost as tight as leggings, with shiny jet buttons up the outer calf, and soft draping over the instep. She offered spats and simple patent leather slippers. There were waistcoats, but they weren’t Mycroft’s beloved self-fabric weskits matching his suits, but lush gardens of embroidered florals over soft, full silk shirts with high collars open at the throat. Chang had drawn a flash of vivid color in a necklace worn inside the open collar.

“It’s…” Mycroft scowled. “It’s…”

“Female,” Chang said, calmly. She waved a thick, graceless hand over her drawings. “You don’t understand, Holmes… I’ve studied you. Lady Smallwood sent over photos of your former self. Clothes do make the man—and the woman. You were quite the sharp dresser. Tasteful, with a traditional aesthetic, more than a little daring. Some beautiful tweeds. I’m impressed. But if you want to make a similar impression as a woman, you’ve got to accept that you’d be dressing _as a woman._ Your old clothes didn’t flaunt your gender in a tawdry way, but neither do these—they are strongly influenced by traditional style and silhouettes, they even draw on your own male attire. I spared you the classic twin set so beloved of British women in politics. Not to mention our Majestic Liz’s wretched hats and lapels. I got you out of heels. But what you can’t do—dare not do—is turn yourself into _me._ Your old clothes rejoiced in your gender. Your new ones must, too. That’s almost the definition of fashion, you know—show off the beauty of the form.”

He glowered. “I’d feel a total prat.”

She snorted. “Look at me, Holmes…no, not that sideways glance avoiding real observation. You’re famous for your attention to detail and your deductive ability. _Look at me.”_

He forced himself. She was graceless, he though. Unbeautiful. Dressed like a turn of the century lesbian cross-dresser. Dressed, he thought in sudden horror, rather as he’d be dressed if he clothed himself in his old wardrobe.

He looked more closely, noting the stubble, the thick wrists. He frowned, then, a prickle of nervousness creeping up his spine. He glanced at her throat, where a high collar almost hid her… _his_ Adam’s apple.

“You’re…”

“Changed,” she said, acid dripping from the single word. “I _was_ a woman. I preferred to be a woman. I still prefer to be a woman.”

“You…do not dress to match your philosophy,” Mycroft said, his mouth suddenly dry. “You’re…”

“Butch. Ugly and butch. Count it as a cautionary lesson. Or an act of protest thrown in the teeth of the uncaring gods,” Ginny Chang said. “Or assume I can’t make the emotional transition I ask of you. Or think what you like. But look at me, and know that in terms of fashion you can’t hide. It’s impossible, if you want to be anything like what you were. You were a man. You are a woman. The world has room for either. It has damned little kindness for anyone who isn’t properly one or the other, though. If you want to cut a figure in your profession, be seen as anything remotely like what you once were, you’ve got to be able to…transpose. So, do you still want to be seen as a sharp dresser?”

He nodded, reluctantly.

“A bit daring?”

Again he nodded.

“Too proud to do anything less than shine?”

One corner of his mouth twitched up, and he laughed, suddenly. “It’s a game.”

“And it wasn’t before?” she asked. She pulled a heap of photos out from a cubbyhole on her desk. He looked at himself—ambling in a trim pinstripe, umbrella swinging jauntily; in his favorite country tweed, with the vivid thread of Caribbean blue woven in among the sand and dun warp and woof; in a formal black suit so crisp and clean and neatly pressed you could shave on the trouser creases, with his fancy watch chains stretched gleaming across his belly and his favorite fobs swinging and catching the light. “Tell me that wasn’t a game,” she said.

He—she smiled. “A game. A glorious game.”

“It will be again,” she said, her voice suddenly comforting. The wide paddle-fin of a hand patted his wrist. “I promise, my dear. It shall be a game, and I shall dress you to win. You will be professional, female, and remarkable.” She chuckled. “I’ll even make sure you can keep the watch chains and the brolly.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> J. Watson, Lestrade, and Sherlock. Relationships.

 

“So,” Lestrade said, bemused that evening. “New diaphragm, new club, new wardrobe, and that’s that? Voila, the vast gender divide disappears with a poof and life returns more or less to normal?”

“I think you might want to rephrase,” Mycroft said, as she sat at the kitchen table sipping hot tea. “’Like a poof’ seems a bit florid, under the circumstances. Or entirely too apropos. And no—I think this just means I have the bare entry-level resources to tackle an impossible situation. I can’t decide what’s most disturbing about it—that so much of this is petty and trivial, or that it’s necessary at all. My mind and my skill-set remain much as they were. In theory this should be nothing more than a costume change.”

Lestrade gave him a patient, but brooding look. “No, love. Think about it—I’ve known you over a decade, now. I’m pretty sure in all those years you never cried over a shift from a three-piece to white-tie and tails. Much less twice in a day.”

Mycroft stared at the cup on the table—a favorite Art Deco cup in sunshine yellow. “I’d claim hormonal disruption, but can’t decide if it’s horrifyingly true or horrifyingly false. I’m not sure what I’m going to do if this turns me into the sort of person who falls to pieces over trivia.”

“Having your gender changed against your will isn’t trivia.”

“Why not,” Mycroft said, with a frown. “It’s just…what does Sherlock call it? ‘Transport.’ The body moves you around, and so long as it does it’s irrelevant, really.”

“As Sherlock so aptly proved last night,” Lestrade pointed out, his anger still a fierce presence, darkening tone and mood. “Doesn’t matter in the least, does it?”

They both considered. Mycroft looked across the table at her partner. “Does it matter to you? Really?”

Lestrade’s mouth tightened, and he said, with painful caution, “It makes a difference. Not sure you want to talk about that, though. Not yet. It doesn’t make a difference in whether I love you or want to stay with you.”

“But it does make a difference.”

“Less than it will make with most people.”

“’Less’ is not ‘none,” Mycroft growled. “And I’d prefer to know the worst.”

“No.” Lestrade’s voice was unrelenting, and his face was set in calm, stubborn stone. “You really don’t, love. ‘The worst’? Right now? The worst is going to touch down on every stupid, clueless, knee-jerk bias I’ve picked up from our culture and from Pavlovian conditioning  over the past fifty years. Little, stupid stuff that’s going to be ambushing us years from now. Assumptions that are going to make an ass of me. Settle, Mycroft—settle for me loving you, and believing that you’re still you, even with an all-new physique.”

“It makes that much difference?”

Lestrade got up, poured himself fresh tea water, and said in a dead, weary voice, “If it didn’t make that much difference I probably would have given you hell yesterday for crying twice. After all—Mycroft Holmes doesn’t, and Greg Lestrade doesn’t expect it of him.”

Mycroft shuddered. “You were being…chivalrous?”

Lestrade sat back down and met his eyes. “Probably. At least a bit. Yeah, it’s a big enough catastrophe to warrant tears. Not many things match it for trauma. They stole your body. They gave you an all new one in a gender you never wanted to be. So, yeah—it’s not out of proportion to cry, even for Mycroft Holmes. But the fact that it’s not out of proportion doesn’t change that it _is_ out of character—and that it was easier to play comforting lover to woman-Mycroft than it would have been to male-Mycroft. Almost reflexive.”

Mycroft felt a sudden longing to sweep the china from the table, to rage against the unfairness of it. She stopped herself, shivering at the thought that it was far too prima donna a behavior to endure, all female melodrama. Then she was really shivering, as the thought turned into an endless regression, her mind pointing out Sherlock’s melodrama and arguing she was second-guessing herself and her gender, only to present counter-arguments, only to start providing little annotations and marginalia suggesting that she was overthinking, or not over-thinking, or that this was a cultural relic, or…

“It’s in everything,” she said, suddenly. “There’s not one corner of my life this isn’t going to change, is there?”

Lestrade shrugged. “Probably not.”

Waking up, and lying down to sleep, and dressing, and dealing with people, and showering, and using the bathroom, and what she ate, and where she went, and what she was going to be able to do from now on—they’d all be colored by the change.

“Greg? Can you wait there a moment,” she said. “There’s something I’ve got to do.”

She stood up, then, and went upstairs. Once in the bedroom she rummaged in the bottom of her robe pocket, pulling out a simple, neat professional business card. She collected her phone from her pocket, and dialed.

“Captain Watson? Yes, this is Mycroft Holmes. You attended on me yesterday, and were kind enough to offer… Yes. Yes, I feel a bit foolish calling in the favor so soon, but—yes. I…yes. ‘Crashing’ does seem like a reasonable description. You’re free this evening? You don’t mind? Then, yes. Please. Come on over. I…think I need a friend.” When she hung up, she wondered if Captain J. Watson would ever understand what it meant for Mycroft Holmes to admit, to himself or anyone, that he needed a friend—not just an associate, or an ally, but a friend.

oOo

‘You’re right. It gets into every inch of your life,” Watson said, sprawled in a leather armchair in the library of Mycroft and Lestrade’s flat. She was, Mycroft thought, a comfort—convincingly masculine without being the uneasy, coarse caricature Ginny Chang had presented. She was a short, compact little woman, with a strong but still graceful build, but solid enough to use her body with focus and vigor. There was something athletic and assertive about her that overrode any feelings of being in company with a woman. Her clothes were attractive, but plain and, far from the suits Ginny Chang had shown, were almost genderless: chinos, an oxford button down shirt, a jumper in a soft oatmeal.

Of course, Chang would have pointed out that what Watson wore wasn’t in any sense a transposition of what Mycroft would have worn as a man. She wondered if it was or was not a transposition of what the doctor would have chosen in his prior body.

“Names,” Watson said. “I ended up settling for Johanna. ‘Jackie’ or ‘Johnnie’ sounded too cute. Joan too plain, too saintly, too Scottish—like my middle name. Now my nickname’s ‘Jo,’ which is a bit odd for a John, but still, no sticky, girly ending. It works. And thank God a military title or ‘doctor’ aren’t gendered.”

“I’ve been Mrs. Lestrade too much of the day,” Mycroft agreed. “And no one knows what to call me except Lady Smallwood, who just sweeps through calling me Mycroft, the same as ever. I told my protégé to call me ‘M.’”

“You’ll end up wanting to make some kind of decision, just so you can get everyone on the same page,” Jo said. “First name, last name, any title or honorific. Mrs., Ms, Miss. Did you take a doctoral degree of any sort?”

“Several,” Mycroft said, voice dry.

“Then for God’s sake, use ‘em. It’s a whole lot simpler to be Dr. Holmes than it is to fuss with the other stuff. Once you can clear a doctoral degree you’re on Easy Street in the world of the Changed.”

She nodded, considering it. For most of her life she’d been content to allow her degrees, too easily obtained and too secondary to her actual career, to go unmentioned. Now, they provided a diplomatic escape hatch to an unsettling question. “I suppose my husband would be ‘DI Lestrade,’ even if he were Changed,” she said—and was instantly swept with relief that Lestrade was not Changed. She would, she thought, have been a far less gracious partner than Lestrade had been. She had no idea what she’d have done had she woken one day to find herself possessed of a wife.

“Is…does…” She stared fixedly at the fireplace. “How difficult is the transition in a….relationship?”

Watson shot her a knowing look. “Truth? Most relationships don’t survive the Change. The few that do either shift to celibate mode in some sense, or are rare cases of pairings with pretty fluid sexual identities in the first place.”

“My husband’s…fluid.”

“And you?”

“Rather not.”

“Then expect a hell of a ride,” Watson said, grimly. “Even if he adapts, that leaves out the fact that you’ll have to adjust, too.”

“I can’t just close my eyes and think of England?” she asked, bitterness rising up like gall in her throat. “Is it that difficult to be female?”

“How hard do you expect it to be when your body’s sending you intense messages but they’re the wrong messages?” Watson growled, exasperated. “Even if you’re aroused, it’s going to keep reminding you that it’s the wrong body, wrong genitals, wrong response patterns. It’s a profound change. You can get through it. It’s going to be hard to get through it within a familiar relationship, though—it’s going to keep defying each of your expectations.”

“Advice?” Mycroft snapped.

Watson shot down the last of her scotch. “Not really. I’d say ‘don’t do it like I did,’ but it worked OK for me. I got drunk as a skunk and dragged home a long string of strangers, male and female. Eventually I found a balance point.”

“Which is?”

“My body likes men. My brain likes women. I’ve learned to choose which dominates based on who I’m with. A peculiar form of time sharing, but it works for me,” she said, with a sort of dry, gritty sarcasm. “I get by. You learn to turn off the bits of you that are screaming.”

It didn’t sound entirely optimal. Mycroft risked saying so.

“’Optimal?’” Jo snorted, and turned to look at her new ‘Little Sister.’ “Optimal happens to other people, from here on in. We’re Changed. What we get is ‘endurable.’”

oOo

Jo Watson’s summary seemed too apt, as the weeks dragged on. Mycroft attended the various counseling sessions planned for him—her—by Lady Smallwood. On the whole Mycroft found the little doctor’s advice and support as useful, and far more easily tolerated. Jo’s gritty, knock-about blend of decency and fierce rage seemed somehow to blend in ways that offered human warmth and understanding without leaving Mycroft feeling stripped of her dignity and masculine independence. Jo Watson was a good friend for a man…or a woman of the Changed.

She laughed at Mycroft’s new wardrobe, but admired it, too: “Nice threads, Em. Very nice. Your people are right—professional, and conservative enough somehow, but even I can see they’re sharp. And they’re nowhere near so tarty as they sounded when you talked about ‘em. Yeah, you’re a woman in ‘em—but you’re not a political slut.” She sat cross-legged on the bed in the Pall Mall flat, drinking scotch again and reviewing as Mycroft tried on outfit after outfit.

“That Victorian frock-coat look works. She managed to make it play as a man’s suit and a woman’s dress.”

“It’s a better solution than I expected,” Mycroft conceded.

“You look a treat,” Lestrade said from the doorway, grinning as Mycroft turned and checked herself in the mirror. “Suits you.”

She glanced at him, and away, barely repressing a frown. “It will do. Ginny Chang delivered—the clothes are as close to the edge as anything I wore before, but not over the top. And I must concede, she did get me out of that boxy Chanel twin set look.” Her hand went to the swinging, heavy gold chain that draped across her stomach, looping from pocket to button holes and back to her watch pocket. The line of her lapels framed the double-arch and dangle of watch fobs, and it all came together in a way that accentuated the illusion of a narrow waist Mycroft did not in fact possess.

Lestrade stepped into the room, and gently stroked the top-line of Mycroft’s shoulder, and ran a finger down the inner fold of her lapel. “It’s good,” he said. He wasn’t articulate about fashion, but his eyes said he liked what he saw.

She shied away. “It will do,” she said, and busied herself arranging purchases on hangers and in drawers.

After a few minutes, Lestrade left.

“You’re not sleeping with him,” Jo Watson asked, eyes far too knowing.

“No,” Mycroft said. “I can’t.”

oOo

He couldn’t. She couldn’t. Whatever it was inside her couldn’t. Lestrade offered in a million ways, direct and indirect. Mycroft fled.

Closing his eyes and thinking of England was hopeless. When Lestrade touched Mycroft, Mycroft’s body either didn’t respond at all—or did. Of the two she found she preferred it when it simply didn’t. When it did…

She tried to discuss it with the counselor assigned to her.

“It’s crazy. I resent him for liking my body,” she said, bitterly. “Like he’s committing adultery against my old body. Or like he maybe never liked my old body in the first place. And at the same time I want to scream at my new body for reacting—it does it wrong, it has no right. It’s like my body and Lestrade have run off on a nasty little cheater’s weekend, and I’m stuck watching every bit of it, screaming at them both.”

The counselor said, firmly, “You’re right—that’s crazy. It’s a destructive approach to the problem, Dr. Holmes. Surely you can come up with more rewarding ways of framing the situation? Exploration? Variation?”

No. She couldn’t. Most of all she couldn’t find a way to shake the anger she felt at Lestrade for being attracted to the new body—the ugly, unwelcome new body. The woman’s body. The all-wrong, nothing-right body. The usurper. The thief.

She knew she was in trouble when she found herself holding a pair of nail scissors, considering dragging the sharp tip down her arm.

“It was like I could do it, and it wouldn’t be me,” she told Jo Watson, shuddering later. “I could punish my damned body.”

Jo nodded—not just her “friend” gesture, but a crisp, professional motion. “Body dysmorphia and a heap of physical disassociation,” she said. “It’s pretty common among the Changed. You’re in your forties, and for all your life you and your body have been the same person. Now they’re not…not to you. I’m told that transsexuals suffer the same problem naturally. I couldn’t say, myself, but I can say that it’s perfectly natural for Changies to feel it.” She looked at Mycroft, meeting her eyes. “You may never get past it entirely,” she said. “Your whole life you’ve known who and what you are. Now you’re not, and your whole culture shouts it at you. You may just have to learn not to drag nail scissors down your arm, and get on with life.”

“Did…did you want to hurt yourself?”

“I came pretty close to blowing my brains out a time or two,” Watson said, turning away from her friend. She was frying onions on the stove in Mycroft’s kitchen, making a simple meal of potatoes and eggs. “Considered drugs—but I’m a doctor, and I grew up in a family with alcoholics. Couldn’t bring myself to that. In the end work saved me.”

“When were you changed?”

“On assignment in Kandahar. It’s a trick the terrorists love playing on soldiers. So many of us have put so much into our sense of ourselves as men,” she said. “For me it was a one-two punch. Shot in the shoulder—then three days into my hospital stay I woke up Changed. I thought my life was over. If I hadn’t been assigned to the high security Change Team I don’t know if I’d have made it through. It made all the difference. New environment, new colleagues, and something worth living for. I felt—useful.”

Mycroft nodded. “I want to get back to work.”

“You will,” Watson said.

“My brother’s still not communicating. I thought his reaction to me being gay was bad. This is—he’s not even answering emails.”

Watson shrugged. “It happens. It happens a lot. Family see the change as betrayal. Some fear it’s catching, or that it’s a comment on them somehow. With someone who’s already uneasy, well…it can be easier to walk away.”

Mycroft’s heart broke at the thought. “Sherlock and I haven’t had an easy relationship for much of our lives. But—he’s my brother. My baby brother. I took care of him when he was little. Almost as much as Mummy or Father, I think. Maybe even more. ‘Mummy’s Little Helper.’ I looked after my brother. I love him. I…” She blinked, and turned away, trying to hide a move to dry her eyes on the dishcloth.

Watson said nothing, instead just finishing the eggs and home fries and plating them. She shoved the food toward Mycroft, across the kitchen table. “Eat.”

“How did you cope?” Mycroft said, sitting and picking up her fork, only to stare blankly at the plate.

“Told you. Got drunk, had sex with strangers, got new work. I can’t recommend it, but I can say it worked for me.”

Mycroft thought of what that would do to her marriage and her career, and shook her head. “It wouldn’t for me.”

“Then find another answer,” Watson said.

oOo

She was suffering her first menstrual period when Sherlock returned. Worse, he deduced it.

“Wonderful,” he snarled. “Now I’ll have to deal with emotional vagaries on top of your obvious failure to repair this situation.”

Mycroft glared at him. “You’re not so stupid you won’t have done the research. It’s not something I ‘failed to repair.’”

“Of course you failed to repair it. You’ve been presented with a challenge and have been unable to remedy the situation. I believe that’s spelled ‘fail’ in common parlance.” Sherlock sprawled on the sofa, long legs stretched out, ankles crossed, hands thrust deep in his coat pockets. “Saw Lestrade coming in. Looks like he’s not getting much. You couldn’t even turn this into an interesting opportunity for a bit of exploratory kink? Given your natural bent I’d have expected you to regard this as a golden opportunity for play. Here you are, finally fit to play the queen, and uninterested in the role.”

“No need to be crass, brother-mine.”

“What is left for me to be?” Sherlock snarled. “It was bad enough before. Impossible to ignore.  A man like you, and you not only chose to be active, but chose _that?_ This, though—I thought your prior situation was distressing. This is simply insupportable.”

“And your chastity is an improvement?”

“It improves my reasoning.”

“Not demonstrably.”

“It’s a long-recognized truth: abstinence is good for brain work.”

Mycroft rolled his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Yet you seem to be attempting it,” Sherlock drawled.

Little Brother deduced too much. Mycroft sat, grim and silent, knitting her fingers together. She was not ready to share tales of nail scissors and of her adulterous female body with Sherlock. “It’s not all that simple,” she said. “It takes some adjustment.”

Sherlock snorted. “It’s simple biology, brother-mine. Instinct and sex drive. You mastered it once.”

“It’s more difficult, now.”

He studied her. Then, voice taunting, he said, “You might try screwing him, instead of lying there suffering while he screws you.” Then he rose, an installment at a time, and swept from the room. *

Little Brother, she thought again, deduced too much—and his anger was pressing him to goad her beyond anything he’d ever done before.

 

*I am tending to see this blatant TMI as being a reasonable extrapolation of Sherlock’s natural behaviors, based on three elements: his coarseness regarding comments to Sally and Donovan, his sly but still pretty obvious digs about Mycroft as a “queen,” and the fact that he’s really, really angry at Mycroft—which always seems to push Sherlock into more extreme behavior than he might otherwise demonstrate. He may be celibate himself, but he’s quite willing to prove he knows the topic even back in the very first episode.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Return to the office. Discovering Louts are Everywhere--including in the family tree. Progress with Lestrade. Progress with John. Progress with adjustment. Watching Jo Watson manage Sherlock nicely.

 

The end of the month Lady Smallwood had insisted he take off arrived too soon, and not soon enough. Mycroft spent the entire Sunday before he was to go in reviewing status notes from Anthea, current files, spreadsheets, field reports from agents. She was determined that she’d make it through the first week in prime form, leaving no one with any reasonable questions about her fitness to return to duty.

“They’ll invent doubts if you don’t provide them yourself,” Jo said. She stood at the window of Mycroft and Lestrade’s bedroom, arms crossed as she scowled out over the cityscape. “There’s a default assumption going in that if you’re Changed, there’s going to be something wrong with you. Trouble is, it’s true in a way. We’re all of us more fragile than we were before the Change ripped our lives apart. Nietzsche be damned, what doesn’t kill us still leaves us scarred and limping. But whether you screw up or they just decide you’ve screwed up, you’re living in a fantasy if you think you’ll go back without a hitch.”

Mycroft didn’t answer. Instead he laid out the clothes he’d wear the next day, a piece at a time. He checked the bathroom, making sure that soap and deodorant and the scant makeup he felt capable of dealing with and the equally scant hair product were all set out ready for morning. She checked the sleek leather briefcase, and the new umbrella. She was particularly pleased with both. The briefcase was jet black, soft and supple. It kept its form more through the strength of its seams than the rigidity of its leather. The case was designed for the assumption of laptop and tablets and limited paper, with places for discs and media cards, but only a little room for a legal pad and a Mont Blanc fountain pen. The case was held shut with a buckle-lock in the center of a bold repousse gilt faceplate decorated with flamboyant chrysanthemums.

The umbrella handle was similarly done, the raised work of the flower petals knobby and firm under Mycroft’s fingers. The umbrella was as trim, and as tightly furled as any he’d ever carried—a slim line of elegance—but the outer edge of the umbrella was decorated with a narrow band of deep brown fancy-work no wider than the breadth of her pinkie finger. Furled, the umbrella was marked with spiraling streaks of decoration darting down the upper half of the shaft.

“I’m going to be fine,” she finally said to Watson. “Even if they do invent problems. Look at you—you came through, in the end. They respect you.”

Watson sighed. “It’s a special team. Even then—I’m the ‘Changed doctor.’ Not ‘the Army doctor,’ or the ‘battle surgeon,’ or ‘the vet.’ I’m the Changed doctor. It colors things.”

Mycroft’s eyes went cold. “Then I shall be the Changed Mycroft—and they’re going to damned well discover that the only element of that identity that matters is ‘Mycroft.’”

Watson’s face was weary, and her eyes doubted, but she raised her glass in a toast. “Good on you, then, mate. Give ‘em hell.”

oOo

She set the alarm to go off early. In the morning she rose, showered, carefully applied the appropriate toiletries. She’d decided to buck the norms and stand by her preferred eau de cologne/aftershave rather than wear any of the perfumes Anthea had suggested. All had seemed too aggressive, and he’d fallen back on his favored lime scent. When Anthea had protested, he’d glowered at her and said, firmly, “Barring pheromones, scent really can’t be said to be gendered…and, really, Anthea, _lime_! Hardly what one would consider either butch or girly, now, is it? The worst they can accuse me of is smelling like citrus, which just doesn’t rate highly as insults go.”

In the month since the Change her hair had grown almost as long as Sherlock’s, and without the hair product he’d once used to control it, it was almost as curly. Lady Smallwood had taken her to a salon, and it had been trimmed and shaped into an easy, startlingly informal mop that could be brushed off her brow. They’d bleached out the already fading hair at her brow and her temples, giving her startling white angel-wings flipping back from her face, standing out against russet picked up and freshened with a red rinse.

She wore a light blush, a quick layer of an oddly transparent golden-brown lip gloss, and mascara, having proven incapable of applying eyeliner without poking herself, and unwilling to wear layers of foundation.

For her first day’s work she was wearing a deep forest green tailored frock jacket with black cording and jet buttons, a waistcoat like a summer garden, narrow black pants and a black silk shirt open at the throat, and a square emerald pendant in a wide gold setting hanging from a heavy gold chain that matched her watch chain. An emerald fob swung at her waist. On her hands were her wedding ring, the old gold band from before her wedding, and, on Lady Smallwood’s recommendation, a gold ring set with a deep green onyx stone on the index finger of her right hand. Her shoes were simple slippers topped with simple black spats, disappearing up her trousers invisibly.

She stood in front of her mirror in the bedroom and studied herself, slipping the briefcase strap over her shoulder and hooking the umbrella handle over her elbow. Her eyes stared out at her, worried and unsure.

“You look great,” Lestrade said, lying in bed, bent arm propping up a creased, friendly face and a tangle of bedhead. “You’ll leave ‘em gasping.”

She turned and looked at him. “Sure?”

“Certain.” He didn’t flirt, though, or make any more suggestive comment. He hadn’t in weeks.

She frowned, and said, “Close your eyes and stay where you are.”

“Huh?”

“Close your eyes and don’t move. Please?”

His lids dropped, and an uncertain smile fluttered and was gone. “Like this?”

“Yes. Now, don’t move. Not an inch. Promise.”

“I promise.”

She slipped off the umbrella and the briefcase, and settled gingerly on the bed, leaning closer and closer. At first she studied his face—so familiar, and so dear, and yet lately so often unwelcome. She closed her eyes tight, then, reaching for tenderness. It had to still be there. She was close enough to smell the faint trace of morning breath, forgiven many mornings before. She kissed his cheekbone, nuzzled to locate his mouth, and kissed him slowly—first chaste and dry-lipped, then tracing his lips with her tongue, then, when he opened for her, sliding in. She felt him move toward her and paused, saying, “No. Stay still…” then resumed the kiss.

She felt arousal coil inside, in all the wrong places. She turned away from the detail, forcing herself instead to concentrate on his lips, his tongue, the feel of him against her mouth. What had Watson said? That he—she—had learned to switch off whatever part was screaming. It was easier this time: a stalk, a strategy, just enough of a mental exercise as she planned her actions to keep her from fixating on all the ways her own response was wrong.

Excited, aroused, but wrong.

At last she leaned back, and said, “All right. You can open your eyes now.”

When he did his pupils were blown wide and dark, and she felt a shiver of victory surge.

“Nice?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he responded.

“I can’t promise more, yet. Not yet. But—I’m working on it,” she said. Her chin rose, and she growled, “I will not let this beat me. I won’t.”

He nodded. “Fierce, you. Killer.”

“Indeed,” she sniffed. “Now, I’ve got to get to work. Have a good day, my dear.” She’d said the same what seemed like a million times before—and like never enough times, before the Change had stolen her mornings. She got up, retrieved umbrella and briefcase, and left.

oOo

She watched herself walk up to the entrance of the MI6 building, her reflection in the big plate glass panels clear.

She would do, she thought. She was still tall, for a woman, and even tall compared to many men. At 5’11” she’d only lost two inches to the Change. If anything she thought she looked taller than she had, even without wearing any more heel than she’d be wearing in her men’s brogues. The black suit and pants, the deep green jacket and brocade weskit, the open throat of the shirt showing her long, slim neck, her head high, her hair light and full and as lively as Sherlock’s…yes. She looked tall. Her shoulders seemed wider than they had been before the change, with the tailoring and padding a woman’s jacket permitted that would have looked entirely too poncy in his male attire. If the narrow waist was an illusion created by wide shoulders and wide jacket skirts and curving, serpentine structural seams and dramatic darts, it was nonetheless an effective illusion.

She stopped for a moment and considered. The woman staring back at her, dim and ghostly in the dark glass, was a force to be reckoned with. She was indeed a fit transposition of the Mycroft he’d been as a man. She allowed a smirk to turn up one corner of lips that no longer seemed quite so horribly wide and unappealing as they once had, and swept into her kingdom, trailing glory behind her.

oOo

_How’s it going? JW_

Mycroft looked at the text that had jingled onto her phone just as she opened the sandwich package Anthea had brought her as lunch.

_So far surprisingly well. I am apparently a terror—but they appear to be rather pleased about that. As though it’s a mark of prestige of some sort that I came back even more draconic than I left. MH_

_Might have known you’d be the one person who could turn being a ball-busting Changie into an advantage. Damned Holmes… JW_

_Consider it a gift. MW_

_Can you give it to me? JW_

_I’m afraid you have to develop your own gifts, my dear Dr. Watson. MH_

_Damn. Oh, well. Anything interesting happening? JW_

_Yes. Most of it classified, I’m afraid. No progress tracing the source of my attack. MH_

_Didn’t know you were investigating that. JW_

_We investigate all Change attacks. MH_

_What have you learned? And, yes, consider that something I take personally. JW_

_Very little, and what we do think we know is beyond classified. MH_

_Damn. Damn._

Mycroft could imagine the little doctor’s fist slamming into the frame of an ambulance door, or ramming sideways into a wall. By now she knew Jo Watson well enough to know that anger and violence percolated only a little way under the surface. She occasionally wondered if it was a good thing or not that work on the high security Change team meant Jo carried a handgun, just in case active terrorists were still onsite when the team arrived. It felt just a little like leaving Sherlock alone in a fully stocked chemistry lab—like tempting fate.

_I wish I could tell you more, my dear, but we are working on it. I promise. MH_

_Yeah. Thanks. It does help. Some. I thought it was just a dead letter. JW_

_Not in the least. This is exactly the sort of issue that turns my people into hungry, hungry tigers. MH_

_Good hunting, then. JW_

_Why don’t I pick you up after work? You can come over for dinner and we can talk. MH_

_Yeah. Ok. Sure. We’re out of St. Bart’s today. Pick me up in the loading turn-around. JW_

_Very good. Expect me at about 5:30. MH_

_Good-o. Ta. JW_

Mycroft ate her sandwich, then called Lestrade. “Was texting Jo Watson today. She sounded like she could use a pick-me-up. Mind if I drag her over to dinner? I forgot and asked her first, but if you mind I can take her out to a restaurant or pub and leave you some peace and quiet till I’m home.”

“No, bring her. Probably for the best. Help me remember that this morning wasn’t a short-term promise, just proof of good faith.”

“Someday, love,” Mycroft said, hoping she was telling the truth.

“Love you.”

“Love you, too.” That, she thought, she could say without hesitation. She closed her eyes and succeeded in pulling back a faint echo of that morning’s kiss—both good and bad, but all of it alive in a way she hadn’t felt since the Change. “Later.”

“Laters.”

The worst part of the afternoon was an interdepartmental meeting specifically to bring her up to date on the current status of all her subordinate and auxiliary teams. The fact that her Change was what necessitated the meeting would have been bad enough. Worse was the slow, constant undertow of testing, from both men and women. Analytical’s Bodner was too solicitous, suggesting she should delegate more “now that you’re in recovery,” as though she were an addict or a chronically ill patient. Riendeau who oversaw the field agents was supercilious and too schmarmy, over-explaining details Mycroft could have rattled off in her sleep and turning all his swear-words into euphemisms while shooting her coy glances, as though she were someone’s maiden aunt. Lorimer, their star statistician, tried to take her on head-to-head, with a “not enough room for two women of our caliber in this agency, sister,” attitude that reminded Mycroft of Sherlock in a snit.

She decided she was grateful that her fighting mode had always been arch dagger-work, rather than pure _force majeur._ Not only were there fewer gender issues, but when she did haul out the heavy artillery the effect was stunning. Lorimer, for example, came to the stunning realization that she was approximately five seconds from being an ex-MI6 agent after her third foray against Mycroft. Fortunately Lorimer really was close to Mycroft’s caliber of intelligence. She backed down quite eloquently, and rainbows and butterflies returned to the Peaceable Kingdom.

It was a long meeting, and tiring after all the weeks away, but by the end Mycroft was actually feeling quite smug. She dismissed the division heads, spent another hour in her office sorting through minor fires Anthea hadn’t quite managed to control on her own, and was just thinking of leaving when there was a knock at the door.

“Come in?”

Riendeau slipped in, flashing a flirty smile over his shoulder at Anthea, then turned back to Mycroft. His smile grew, and Mycroft felt an odd sense of disorientation.

“Yes?”

“I wanted to check whether you’d like me to resume my role as your brother’s handler,” Riendeau said, pleasantly. “It’s been years since you seconded him over to MI5, and with the amount of international work he’s done the past year or so it seemed like it might be best to return him to our own management.”

Mycroft resisted the temptation to point out that the one time Riendeau had attempted to manage Sherlock, it had come very close to actual armed combat. “No. He’s finally settled with Foster, since I married Lestrade. I can’t think it would be productive to make him adjust to yet another handler. He’s always such a stroppy little brat when we change management. Thank you for asking, though.”

“You’re too easy on him,” Riendeau said. “Always have been. Maybe now’s the time to admit he’s beyond your control, and let someone else take over. It’s not like you’d lose face, now.”

Mycroft blinked. “Excuse me?”

“And it would give us a chance to work more closely. I’ve always admired your abilities. You know that, don’t you?”

Mycroft had actually always suspected Riendeau resented competition. He was a bit of a herd stallion in personality—he wanted to be alpha, and chase all the other promising men out of his division. A handsome man—cocky and charming, with an air of James-Bond panache, always trying to live up to movies with budgets bigger than the entire annual income of minor nations. No, Mycroft corrected himself, considering the cost of some of the Bond movies, maybe not even minor nations. Mid-size…

“I’m pleased we’ve been able to maintain a good working relationship over the years.”

“I thought so,” Riendeau said, and the smile grew, and darkened, developing an odd note of…

 _Bugger_ , Mycroft thought in shock, _he’s coming on to me…_

The other man was. He prowled across Mycroft’s carpet and settled one hip on the edge of Mycrot’s desk, crossing his arms and looking down appreciatively. “I thought you’d like to know—you came through it quite impressively.”

“What?” Mycroft was clever about analysis. He was a bit less sure about the nature of… oh. “It’s mostly smoke and mirrors,” he said, with a growl. “I’m afraid I got dealt most of the same genes as a woman as I had as a man. Beaky nose, ginger, inclined to put on weight. Lady Smallwood just made sure we’d package it decently.”

“Modest,” Riendeau crooned, and reached out one finger to stroke the white wing of Mycroft’s flipped-back fringe. “Red-head with snow on the roof. Beautiful. You know, I always suspected you fancied me, back in the day. Tested the waters a time or two.”

Back in the day, before Lestrade, Mycroft had at least considered the possibility. If he’d been in any way inclined to fish in home waters he’d have tried harder, and he had to admit to himself with a shiver of guilt that he’d occasionally attempted to flirt with the man. He hadn’t pawed at his hair, though, or…

Or traced his finger down the man’s cheek to play with his collar….

Mycroft reached up and gingerly removed the straying appendage. “Back in the day I wasn’t married, Riendeau.”

“Back in the day you weren’t a knockout, My.”

“You can call me Holmes, or Mycroft. Not ‘My.’”

“Fiery, like your hair. I like that. Come on. You can’t say you weren’t interested. Now it’s all come out right.”

“Not exactly,” Mycroft snapped. “Not on the market any more—and never was looking for more than a flirt even back in the day. As for now?” She didn’t have to fake her shudder. “I have enough to deal with, Riendeau, without adding _you_ to my problems.”

“God—you’re as fagged out as a woman as you were as a man?” Riendeau scrambled from the edge of the desk, scowling. “Fuck. I didn’t know it carried over. You’re a dyke?”

Mycroft blinked, trying to follow the logic. “I’m not interested. I don’t fuck colleagues, I’m fresh from Change, I’ve got a backload of work, and I’m married. How does that translate as ‘dyke’? And what the devil business would it be of yours even if I were?”

Riendeau scoffed. “Don’t say it’s not obvious. Everything’s lined up, this time. Me, you. Boy meets girl. Eyes meeting over the conference table. Girl works late. Boy comes in for a chat. It’s an old story, Holmes. A shame your quirk carried over.” He tidied his suit jacket, as though he’d picked up cooties from Mycroft’s desk. “Must be hard on your husband.”

Mycroft stared, trying to sort the entire situation out. At last, at a loss, he turned to the computer, pulled up a new screen, and started typing.

“You can’t avoid me forever, sugar,” Riendeau said. “You’ll be sorry you passed the chance up.”

Mycroft frowned. “Would you say ‘delusional’ or merely ‘narcisistic?’” she asked in a conversational voice, hands hovering over the keyboard.

“What?”

“I’m having you written up for a psych check, Riendeau. Oh, and making a private note in your files that you’re apparently having some issues with appropriate behavior. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m supposed to pick up a friend and take us home for dinner with my husband, and I’m running late.” Her fingers flew, then. “I think maybe ‘delusional’ _and_ ‘narcissistic.’ That way I’ve covered all the bases. Don’t let me keep you—Anthea can let you know when your psych appointment will be.”

It wasn’t quite as dramatic a victory as Mycroft would have liked—but judging by the speed of Riendeau’s retreat, it was at least a lasting victory.

oOo

“Anthea was still laughing when I left,” Mycroft told Watson, who was doubled over herself whooping in the sleek black limo. “Apparently Riendeau’s a ‘known hazard.’”

“They all are,” Watson said. “I never realized what fuckin’ jerks we men are until I got Changed. Even the polite ones—they’re either gay and not interested, or they’re gaming the system, or you get lucky and they’re not that into you. Those are the options.” She looked slyly at Mycroft, and said, “Oh, come on now. Don’t tell me it doesn’t work the same way in Gayland.”

Mycroft scowled. “But there are _rules._ ”

“Like what? Don’t do anything you can’t be sure you’ll get away with? I bet if you’re weak and defenseless you’re as much prey as any woman is.”

Mycroft shrugged. “I…suppose. I am afraid I mainly made a point of never being weak and defenseless. And I never liked stalking helpless prey.”

“Liked stalking, though?”

Mycroft shrugged again. “Mostly too shy, or too professional. I did take the first pass at Greg…but from that point on he was the hunter. “

“Ran till he caught you?”

Mycroft flashed his friend a smile. “Something like that.”

Jo studied her, and said, “Hey. You’re doing better, aren’t you?” When Mycroft ducked her head, Jo chuckled, and said, “Yeah, you are. I can see it. That’s great, Mycroft!”

“Too early to know for sure,” Mycroft murmured. “Just—trying something new.”

“Well, good luck to you both,” Jo said. “I mean it. So few of us ever keep what we had from before the Change, or get anything work keeping after it. It’s nice to see someone luck out. I’ll be rooting for you.”

The limo pulled up, and soon Mycroft and Jo were home. There was a rich smell of home-made chicken curry, and Lestrade’s voice carried from the kitchen, calling greeting. The two headed back, as Lestrade said, “So, love, how was the first day?”

“I survived the morning, ruled the afternoon, and dealt with an office come-on in the early evening without panicking,” Mycroft said, taking a glass from Lestrade’s hand. She gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“Progress, I see,” Sherlock’s voice drawled, and she turned to find him leaning lazily on a counter behind her. “At least you’re not pretending you’re living with Jack the Ripper any more.”

“She never did pretend anything of the sort,” Lestrade growled, tossing a towel at Sherlock’s head. “Prat. Sherlock, I’d like to introduce you to our friend, Jo Watson. She’s a medical doctor on the Change team that attended Mike. Jo—Sherlock. Mike’s brother—and thus not Mike’s fault. Don’t blame her for anything the twat says.”

“He does say awful things,” Mycroft conceded, plucking a plum from a bowl set out on the kitchen table. She glanced mischievously at her brother, and said, “We keep hoping someday he’ll become civilized, but so far no progress has been seen.”

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed. “If by civilized you mean I won’t comment on the fact that your very first ‘friend,’ barring Lestrade here, is another Changie like yourself, don’t be stupid. Of course I’ll comment. It’s a depressing indication of narrowing expectations and willingness to settle for reduced hopes. The society of the abnormal sufficing for a broader circle of association. But then I’d be forced to admit that, for you, a social circle of the abnormal would be an expanded horizon.”

Jo Watson’s eyes narrowed, and she said, sharply, “Oi, My! Your parents must have been desperate for another kid, if they went and adopted out of species like this. Condolences, mate.”

Lestrade snorted, but Sherlock set his teeth, and growled, “I like to think they traded up an evolutionary rung after having been disappointed by Mycroft.”

Jo rolled her eyes, and shook her head. “Another delusional one! My, you’re just having a run on nutters today, aren’t you?” Then without a second look at Sherlock she crossed the kitchen and stood on tiptoe, dropping a kiss on Lestrade’s cheek, saying, “Good to be here, Greg, even if you are stuck with the in-law. Now I’ve met the bugger I’ll be sure to remember you and Mycroft in my prayers.”

And she proceeded to either bait or ignore Sherlock for the rest of the evening, until Mycroft’s lean brother left in a huffing fury…to Mycroft’s unexpected amusement.

Her little brother’s anger looked very different, somehow, after an afternoon that had contained Riendeau. All of a sudden he looked far less like a helpless social victim and a lot more like a lout in need of education…and Jo Watson looked like she might be the Changie who could manage it.

Note: probably the last post for tonight. Real World Calls.

Addendum: I do hope that before this arcs out I get to run some counterpoint of Male Changies who've had to experience the reverse shock. Gender expectations and nasty gotcha's run both ways. Right now, with Mycroft and John as our two primary Voices of the Change, we're getting the grumpy "female bemoaning" stuff. But somewhere I'd love to run a few of the reverse elements. Like ex-female Change victims discovering they're always supposed to pick up the check, open the door, provide the broad chest, and apologize for the hard-on....


End file.
